Colonial intent as treachery: a poetic response

Abstract

‘Bird, or How I Became an Acholi Poet’, is a poetic response that demonstrates wer, Luo for song, as a site for knowledge making and social memory as well as a method for resistance and decolonization. This poem features the voices of war veterans, Ugandan exiles who fought in the 1978–79 Liberation war between Tanzania and Uganda, who shared their stories with me during my doctoral fieldwork. One such is Capt. K, who joined the Ugandan exiles in Tanzania after a violent purge of ethnic Acholi and Lango officers and soldiers by Amin in 1972. As he shares his story, Capt. K describes the colonial British as filled with roro. This Luo term, denoting treachery, describes the colonial intent of the British: the creation of ‘the thing’ out from which Fanon’s notion of decolonization is the creation of the [hu]man. I reflect on how ‘bird’, ‘weather’, ‘map’, and ‘grammar’, concepts from Morrison, Brand, Sharpe and Spillers, form the foundation to think about the colonial spectre. I conclude that wer is a decolonial space from which Ugandans can articulate their own humanity beyond the colonial narrative as part of a continuing anti-colonial struggle.